on c-span 3. next, history professors discuss how past infrastructure projects were constructed and funded and the lessons learned that can be applied to current development. the national history center posted the hour-long forum on capitol hill.

>> i want to welcome you to this briefing on the history of infrastructure in the united states. i should explain that this is part of an ongoing series that the center sponsors bringing historical perspectives to current issues. the center is strictly nonpartisan. the purpose of the program is not to advocate for any set of policies but to provide the historical context that can help inform policymakers and the public as they deal with the challenging issues we face. i want to, before handing the podium over, to make a few thank yous. to the mellon foundation, for funding the series, we are grateful. secondly, the office of

congressman gerry connolly who arranged the bookings for this room. finally to amanda berry, associate director of the center who did the hard work of arranging this. now i will turn the podium over our professor from george mason university. >> thank you. i am honored to be here today with two distinguished historians of infrastructure and an audience that is willing to be persuaded that knowledge of history can inform present debate. we are in a room of electric train and we arrived by thatir, jigging coffee passed through a reservoir. thispeople showered morning in water heated by

natural gas. president eisenhower said the unifying forces of transportation are element to the united states. crucial our infrastructure systems to daily existence we often view them as natural and inevitable. shortcomingstice when something does not work. when asked to boil water, when the power goes out or when a bridge collapses. we pay attention to infrastructure only at times of failure. that has certainly been the case with the washington metro, which has received a great deal of attention in the past couple years as reliability has declined. infrastructure is a crucial technology, but not a simple one. the 10 most important words ever written about the history of technology, "technology is neither good or bad, nor neutral. however natural and inevitable

infrastructure system seem, there to product of choices made by people." in many cases, choices have led to benefits. neither benefit your cost can be evenly distributed fully and the most beneficial investments are likely to harm someone's interests. we live the choices made by americans of the past, future generations will live with choices made now by engineers and inventors, operators and maintainers, voters and consumers, private enterprises, public authorities, local, state, federal governments. sponsored byings the center, our goal is not to prescribe policy but to offer historical perspective so that it can help everyone involved to understand consequences of choices that face us today. i'm pleased region is my colleagues who have studied in depth -- i'm pleased to introduce my collies who have

studied -- introduce my colleagues, who have studied these issues in the past. first, has studied flights, article, the her flying machine in the garden, was included in the best american essays of 2007. from 2005 to 2014, she served as the executive director of the history association. she will be followed by peter norton, an associate professor in the department of history at the university of virginia. he is the author of, fighting traffic. rivals, the street invention of the motor age street published in technology avid risee won the

and he is a member of the university of virginia sustainable urban mobility project. each will speak for 10 minutes. i will open the floor to questions after. >> i'm going to try to give you a quick primer on the history of airports in the united states. for the most part the major commercial airports of the u.s. are locally and publicly owned, owned by a city, county, state or public authority. to a airports are critical national and international air transportation system used by a majority of americans, there has long been a debate over funding, construction, maintenance and expansion, should it be local or federal? public or private? to give you context, the first customers for airports were

members of the post office. the post office wanted to use airplanes to carry the mail, they needed airfields, landing fields across the country. they did not have money to build a system of air transportation. they went to local cities and asked them, could you build in a field for us? cities at that time did not have the power to build landing fields, but often private interests would come forward, chambers of commerce or other businessmen would come and established the first airports in this country. 1920's,o back to the public and private entities came forward to establish airport infrastructure. 1930's, when federal money became available for jobs transportation was one of the few expanding areas in the country. there was a great need to

improve airports that had existed, while federal policy said, if you're going to get federal money for this, you have to be publicly owned. many private airports then became public. cities would buy them, sometimes just for one dollar, so they would be technically public airports and could get pwa money. the first big infusion of federal money into airports came during world war ii. many airports around the country, municipal airports were enlisted for the duration. they became training fields, manufacturing sites. a lot of cities, atlanta, chicago, minneapolis, dayton, where i am from, they came out of the war which expanded and improved facilities, because they have been used by the military during world war ii. that set the stage for the

expansion of civil aviation after the war, because of these, the work that had been done during the war. the airport funding after the war became a point of debate. it was no longer a jobs program. it was not defense. should federal money continue to flow to airports? there was momentous debate during the 1950's, were airports strictly local? should cities pay for them or counties or states? or are they indeed a national asset that federal money should be paid for and if indeed money should flow from the federal government, should it come out of general tax revenue or a special trust fund? which is what happens with highways. eventually that decision is made but not until the 1970's, for

the history of airports. there is a long debate about who pays for airports in the united states. is it local or federal? is a public or private? of commercial airports are commercial airlines, which in this country are and always have been, private companies. what should their contribution be to the infrastructure that makes their business model possible? major commercial airports i talked about, there are a wide variety of other airport types in the united states. there are private airports, public access airports, big airports, small airports. they are vying for the same kind of funding large commercial airports that most of us are ying for.with, are v

where does the money from this trust fund go? do we funnel it towardajor airports who seemingly have their own revenue stream with commercial airlines, and the retail they haven't terminals, parking fees? airports,more smaller regional, small general aviation airports, that take traffic away from large commercial airports and make it possible for them to focus on airline traffic? that is a part of the debate. evolved, whoso has should have access to those to receive federal funding? for those of you who know anything about general aviation, it is everything but commercial airlines. they are often seen as free riders in the system. they use air traffic control and theyaying for it

want to use all airports in the country without paying the same kind of fees, so argued the commercial airlines, that they pay. asing the 1950's and 1960's, commercial airline travel in the united states was expanding at a thingsc rate, one of the people pointed to -- why can't we expand more? why do i have delays? why am i circling to get into the airport? these littlega, airplanes are clogging up the airport. there was a big fight to move ga off the big airports and give them their own. but they are saying, it is our tax dollars that are paying for this. there is a lot within the aviation community itself, who gets to use them? issue,ber one problem,

facing airports, that explains a lot of what is going on is, airport noise. especially since the dawn of the jet age but going all the way back to the 1920's, people don't like to live around airports. airports create noise. particularly after the jet age, noise became the single biggest limiter. building new airports and expanding existing airports. if there is a big expense airports have that does not have to do with runways and terminals, it is mitigating noise. either soundproofing homes and businesses around them or as many airports found, the only way to control land use around them is to buy out everyone around you. you tear down the homes and remove businesses, no one there to make complaints anymore.

there is simple answer, but an expensive answer and one that has a dramatic impact on the shape of landscapes around airports in the united states. there is repeatedly the issue of privatization. should airports be publicly owned or privately owned? in much of the western world, airports have become privately owned. the big example is british airports, all privately owned, after thatcher came in, there were talks of privatizing in the united states during the 1980's. it comes up periodically. in the united states we have stuck with the public model. there are people who called for privatization all the time. everyonei would remind of a little thing called the dubai ports deal.

one of the reasons congress decided this was not a good thing, why should we have our ports being operated by foreign companies? capital is global. the british airports are owned by a spanish company. there is my primer on airport history. [applause] >> i want to thank the national history center and it is an honor to be in company with these two great historians, zach and janet and to be in the company of you advising our public servants on how to give us the best infrastructure future we can have. that infrastructure future is dependent upon a past we do not understand well.

more than that i would say, the past we have grown up with about surface transportation in this country is a past created in part to justify the status quo. i don't think we can understand how we got there until we re-examine this past which is what i have tried to do in my work. time is short. i will concentrate on surface transportation infrastructure, particularly on roads and streets. i will concentrate on urban transportation, to try to take on urban and rural would be difficult and more than that, the more anomalous situation to explain is the urban one. thisve a surface system in country that is automobile dependent. it is not necessarily a bad thing.

automobiles are excellent tools for certain jobs, particularly useful in areas of low to moderate density and for trips of more than one mile but under 100. by that standard, there is some degree of sense for our automobile dependent transportation system in the lower density areas. it is harder to explain why this country -- i do not think it is an saturation -- destroyed and rebuilt its own cities in the 20th century to serve automobiles as if the city serves the transportation mode rather than the mode serving the city. i would like to concentrate specifically on that question which has substantial policy implications for the future and a history that i don't think is well appreciated at all. if we were to go back 100 years and tell people in the future, people would drive to work, even

in large cities, expect to find parking, expect policymakers to make sure we had affordable parking, and that much of the urban fabric they knew would be gone to make room for this, they would have been shot. i don't just mean ordinary -- would have been shocked. i don't just mean ordinary americans but experts and policymakers were explicit that you don't rebuild cities to make room for cars, it makes no sense to do so. how did that happen? in asking, we will better understand the status quo. to go back 100 years, you would find people strolling in the streets where they chose, that judges and juries and even police officers of the time were quite accepting of this. we would find, if such a person was injured by a vehicle, the jury and judge would be most likely to find in favor of the pedestrian using the street.

this is something we should be thinking about. as it turns out, walking in cities, is extremely energy efficient, public health inducing, low-cost and spatially efficient way to get around the city relative to the automobile. not to say that the automobile does not have a place, it is a tool and it has jobs for which it is well-suited. our policy error in the 20th century that we are living with tools misunderstanding a that is excellent at certain jobs as the tool for all jobs in all applications. how did this happen? the most common story is that americans preferred the automobile. once itght it in mass became affordable thanks to henry ford and policy responded to this demand and preference. if you go to the national museum

of american history, a short walk from here, you will find that while they are admirably complex in their explanation, the predominant message is, this was a response to popular demand by americans who prefer to drive. that is the account you will get in the exhibit that is the account you will get in the exhibit called "america on the move," which you will find in the general motors hall of transportation, which they paid them to name after them, out of possible generosity or self-interest. i will give you a highly simplified, and for that reason, it could certainly be questioned, but i think the questions will stand up when it gets to the level of detail that

i don't have time to get into. if i offer you this abbreviated account. the first obstacle to automobile predominance in american cities was the notion that people belonged in streets, as they did, and automobiles did not, as they did not. and that was the general consensus view of ordinary americans, as expressed in letters to the editor of newspapers, which were quite vocal. but also judges, juries, police officers, and even transportation experts. the first generation of traffic engineers in this country that dealt with street traffic, as opposed to real traffic, were also unanimous that the automobile is the wrong way to get around the city, and in

fact, the single most predictable recommendation of traffic engineers in the 1920's was to forbid curb parking, to which you would get the objection, it will be hard to drive. which they would say, good, there are better ways to get around the city. urban infrastructure then, particularly electric street railways, while not very fast, moved people in quantity with spatial efficiency and at low cost. now, this was an obstacle to people who wanted a future for automobiles in cities. predominantly at first, local people with this interest. the local automobile club, the local automobile dealers association, the taxicab company. they attack this problem first at a local level. one of the preferred methods was to equate traffic safety with keeping pedestrians off the street, which sounds sort of commonsensical to us now, outside of crosswalks. that was a tough sell one century ago when the first generation of traffic safety campaigns unanimously vilified the car and driver and put all the responsibility on them.

if you want to operate an automobile on a city street, that's fine, but you've got to make sure that as the operator of the dangerous vehicle, you accept the full responsibility of going at a suitable speed and making sure you are alert to pedestrians everywhere. newspaper editorials were unanimous about this. we need to make sure that drivers bear the responsibility. the problem, first of all, is of responsibility shifting. how you do that? in the safety campaigns, local automobile interest groups invented the midwestern slang of jaywalker. the initial one was jaydriver, someone who menaces pedestrians. they reinvented this term to insult pedestrians who walk everywhere, and got boy scouts to hand flyers to people telling

them, did you know you are jaywalking? and newspapers tell us this is how people learned the word. the second step was getting cities to actually legally for bid jaywalking, and by the mid-1920's, they were succeeding at this through means that i won't go into for reasons of time, but which i would be happy to explain. a nice illustration of this redefinition of for whom streets are comes from the yellow taxicab company of chicago, which in 1926 managed to introduce the first coordinated traffic signals on city streets anywhere in the world. traffic signals coordinated so that motor vehicles going a certain speed would never get a red light if they run through one green light at an appropriate speed, they would hit a succession of green lights, sometimes called the green wave. they got this because they

wanted streets to be for cars, namely taxicabs. once they got it in, the response was quite vocal for pedestrians. we can't walk in the street wherever we want anymore. this was a piece of the red -- that redefinition as well. a transitional point came in 1923 when locals of cincinnati, 42,000 of them, signed petitions to mechanically equip automobiles with speed governors such that they would not be capable of going faster than 25 miles per hour. and this was to be a referendum. they got it on a ballot, had the referendum in cincinnati. i call it a transitional point because it terrified people who wanted a future for automobiles in cities into organizing first, locally, then nationally. the automobile interest group of

that time was called the national automobile chamber of congress. they formed a traffic and safety committee and became the predecessor of what is later called the automobile safety foundation, by then funded entirely by the automobile manufacturers association, predominantly general motors. they organized and are quite explicit, we have to redefine city streets as places predominantly for automobiles. we do that by redefining safety as keeping people off of the street, and we redefine safety also as making what they were then pleased to call "foolproof" highways, without grave de crossings, median strips or shoulders, so you would not have collisions. they promised it would eliminate 98% of collisions. it never got there because they introduced new hazards having to do with things like speed and rear end collisions, for example.

and they became the basis for the highway transportation engineering discipline, which promised to free us from the the 1970'sthat by was causing us more than 50,000 fatalities per year, traffic fatalities through highway engineering alone. we have learned the hard way that that was clearly not enough. we have since introduced, sometimes against objections from the automobile industry, ways to reduce those numbers. but as long as we have an automobile-dependent society, conventional automobiles, that affliction will persist. i want to close by saying a word about the future. there is hope, not unreasonable hope, that autonomous vehicles will deliver us from this affliction and other ones like traffic congestion. but by no means is this a panacea or certainty.

technology gives us a menu from which we can choose, it is not an inevitable fate that we have to prepare for, as it is so often characterized. one of the terrible legacies of automobile dependency in the 20th century, i would contend, is that we have public health disasters in the form of sedentary living. it has given us unprecedented levels of preventable disease due to physical inactivity. autonomous vehicles could perpetuate that. in more practical terms, we are dealing now with a physical infrastructure crisis, maintaining infrastructure from the 20th century. it is a tough problem. i'm not sure we can readily accept the proposal to change technology, when technology itself requires substantial maintenance and we should be asking ourselves, do we need to prepare a plan for avoiding a

future of a technology infrastructure maintenance crisis, not just a physical infrastructure maintenance crisis. i also want to it knowledge we that we have a guest from the dwight d. eisenhower commission. carl rigdell, and i suggest that a republican five-star general has warned us about the .ituation we are now in i in 1961,rewell address president eisenhower cautioned us against losing our independence as a democracy to the military industrial complex, the congressional corporate alliance that would compete the with the popular will as

expressed through democracy. that was rise and analogous to what we should now be cautious about, which is come as we have ,, as we've learned since 1930's, much of our transportation policy is the product of similar complexes having to do with organizations like the american road builders association, national highway users conference, the associated general contractors of america, all of which deserve a place at the table, but their voices must not crowd out the voice of the citizenry of the country. thank you very much. [applause] >> i want to draw out electro

themes. first of all, we learned that infrastructure is the physical object and also a series of rules. in your card, you are generally allowed to go where the road is. if you try that at an airplane that is going to be a problem for you. we have debates over the radio spectrum, for example. it is not just a preference but a policy. we are constantly going back and forth between the question of whether infrastructure should respond to popular demand or shape popular demand. it is very delicate. i would like to throw in the name of barbara mikulski, it prominence in a protest in baltimore. it turned into a 40 year career

in congress. i think there is a role for ordinary citizens to say no, this is not our preference. third is this question of public and private that is not an either or question. it is this range of possibilities. how many different things have been tried, many of them have their advantages and disadvantages. there is no one right way to distinguish between public and private. finally, the question of externalities, positive and negative. good works of infrastructure will have benefits long beyond their immediate needs, whereas we heard about traffic fatalities, these costs are not always visible when the project is being designed. we are going to be on tv so please wait for the microphone before you ask a question.

i will look for hands. is sarah jo peterson. if you could speak to freight movement in the city. we spend a lot of time talking about passenger and people movement. i'm wondering how many ups truck s we can send down a road at a time. talk more about the freight side of it. >> historically, both local or motor fleet operators like trucking companies have long been advocates for making roads

and streets including urban roads and streets accommodated to motor vehicles. -- accommodating to motor vehicles. if you go back 100 years or even just 80 years, most of that was a multi-modal system where the freight would be delivered and distributed from warehouses to retail destinations. there were certain streets and roads that were primary conduits for this that kept the truck and other kinds of delivery traffic off of the smaller streets. that's not too different from where we are for the most part today. policy becomes -- there may be a watershed here after the 1950's

when standards start mandating much more accommodating street and road infrastructure for trucks, particularly on the justification that emergency vehicles have to put the fire out and so on and that serves the interests for trucks on these streets and roads as well. this permits the large vehicle traffic to percolate through the urban fabric much more completely for better and for worse depending on who you ask. i would consider that particular policy transition in the mid-20th century, curb turning radii, where the transportation

functional classification system serves motor vehicle access is in important transition. >> maybe they will all be delivered by drone. then you will have an entirely different problems to deal with. -- problem to deal with. >> thank you very much. all three of you are experts on transportation infrastructure, . there are a variety of different kinds of infrastructure that we are trying to deal with as well in terms of electrical grids and the like. one question might be is do any to ask do any of you have any thoughts on that?

or, is this a different ball of wax altogether? the second question has to do with implications for infrastructure in terms of creating transportation infrastructure, they are smaller and denser in population. one of the ways in which you move across great distances are airways and railroads, which have largely disappeared from the american scene. i wondered if any of you like to speak to that as well as? -- i wondered if any of you would like to speak to that issue as well? >> the size of the united states played a big role in the embrace of aviation, we were just very large and airplanes could transport people and things much faster than surface transportation could.

that is what they post office is all about. as early as the 1920's they did an experiment where they were going to fly day and night, the mail from one coast to the other and they could do it in 36 , hours, which was days ahead if of what could happen if it was carried by the railroad. this was quite dramatic to prove the value of airmail, particularly for the contracts or other kinds of documents that were very time sensitive. you could deliver them very quickly. it's a long way from one coast to the other in the united states. so, that also influenced the type of airplanes that we developed here in the united states that then went on to dominate world aviation, where

that become the standard around the world, because it could conquer the distances, and the european powers could then use it because they still had their empires and could use it to travel throughout the world. the size of the u.s. caused it to do that. then, also, you have to have a lot of airports. a lot of people complain. european and asian airports are so much nicer than the u.s. airports. if you think about it, many of them have limited number of places where the international travelers come into and they are designed to be showcase airports. they get a lot of national funding for them. whereas in the u.s. again, every town and city wants to have their airport. we don't have a single national port of entry.

dulles was kind of thought might be that, but we don't have that. we have multiple ones. it's not surprising that we don't have a showcase airport. that is something that doesn't when onethe debate might complain about how global horrible hour airports are -- our airports are. we just have a lot more of them than anyone else. it is a different political economy here. they are locally owned and operated. there are limited amounts of federal funding here and the national government has not designated anyone as your single point of entry. >> about the size of the country and its significance for transportation, i think it's interesting and not generally that well-known that when president roosevelt went to six

drew six lines on the map of the usa in 1938 and handed them to the chief of the bureau of public roads, thomas mcdonald's said people don't want to drive 3000 miles. we have trains to do that. 38's asey had d.c. well. he did not see that is the best way to commit energy. to him, railway made sense. to get a train that at a time suited me i could not take the

charlotte, the departure was an hour late. to make sure i could be here i had to leave last night which meant a hotel room. i think everyone of those signals was a smack in the face. this bothers me when i continue to see what i consider naive statements about what americans prefer to do when they travel presented in absolutist terms. if i had ended up taking the car here it would not have been my , preference. a study would have called that a demand. that could have justified yet another springfield internet exchange. the last time i used it i didn't pay anything for it so why wouldn't i do that? i want to suggest that the large size of the country doesn't -- is not a self-evident justification for long distance road infrastructure.

although clearly some of that is necessary. about other kinds of our infrastructure, there are analogous questions. now, where i am from, a gas pipeline is coming in, most local people are unhappy about it. we have the classic question in infrastructure and janet referred to it when she spoke about noise, to what degree the consider the local preference relative to our larger interest? i want to revive a term that used to be ubiquitous among regulators but i hear less and less, what is the public interest? it's what made many of us remember the equal time rule, you gave one side a point of view and you had to find someone to offer the other point of view and give us public service announcements, too.

those are reflections of the public interest doctrine. it might be a useful guide if not by any means a simple fire --simple fire -- simple fire simplifier of the problem. >> having worked in the direct research of water, these are what economists do with started calling them monopolies when you're building something really big, it's not so healthy to have another big thing build next to it. the privately owned railroads, historians would say we overbuilt. we are going to build one big road or powerline or water line and in some cases they will be privately owned and in other cases publicly owned. we're talking about water that big american city has privately -- cities have privately owned water. all of these have some of the

same issues. including these questions of the public interest. this is a problem if you are committed to vy smal government is what do you do when there are these natural monopolies and even some people are very skeptical of the government role may see it as a role for government in owning or regulating some of these systems. question? >> as you know, eisenhower had developed definite views on infrastructure, and to some degree that came from this experience as a professional military officer, especially in world war ii. when he came into the presidency, he learned to think as a professional military officer inclusively and he

considered freedom of movement and the ability to move over land, at sea, in the air and even in space. his view was very much a larger totalview, but at the core of it was what he carried as a military officer, remembering the five-star general status and generalto be called during and after the presidency. he carried that into the presidency with a core of security. security of the united states as a premier public interest if you will. there was him, the president bringing attention to that. how would you describe the attention to that today as a major element of public interest in the context of infrastructure? eisenhower had an inclusive view

that informed much of what he did as president, but i am not competent about how that is viewed today. >> i'm not sure about my competency about how it is viewed today is distinctive in this room of people who are indeed policy experts. from the national security point of view, as i am sure everybody knows in this room, the interstate highways were justified or argued for on the grounds that they would help to evacuate cities in the event of a soviet attack, they would want to evacuate cities. it appears to me that this was never one of the views president eisenhower shared, in part of from a meeting he held before he left office, where he thought the emphasis on urban highways have been

vastly overplayed. fair, if i am interpreting those notes correctly, there is wisdom there. it was hurricane harvey that hit houston and people could not get out of that city. houston has the best urban highways of the entire planet and they could not get out of that city. if i recall correctly, there was an order not to evacuate because it would have caused chaos on the highways of the city. if i am interpreting the minutes of that meeting correctly that president eisenhower did not share of the view that highways were the best way to evacuate people. i think history will bear him out. not just in hurricane harvey, but in other hurricane evacuations, that has not been a stupendous success. >> this is an issue for many countries, the roman empire bill

oads to connect freight. starting in the early modern. -- european countries -- starting in the early modern countries built railroads, you think about the countries like canada and russia holding those long trunk lines. the transcontinental railroad in the u.s. is easier to justify it on military grounds rather than freight grounds. i think it has made a stronger sense of the limits, conference in canada where i had a chance to talk to canadian historians. canada built an interstate national highway but they built one and then it's up to to build -- up to the provinces to build what kind of connectors they want. this leads to fewer urban high

ways. this goes back to what peter was saying about surface streets can have too much of a thing, that is true of highways and airports, that can be true of railroads. i don't know if there is any place that has overbuilt water. dams.nly >> security is tied to the airports. most commercial airports are also co-located with the national guard and reserve units. they are an important part of that. they always have been from the beginning.

navy, air force, army units on the airports, so that is still there and can cause some problems. but, again, most people if they want to encounter the national security state or the new normal, go to the airport. take off your shoes, i had to show id to get in this building, take off my shoes, go through a metal detector and a full body scan to go get on an airplane today. security in that way has certainly impacted the airport. but for national security interests, the airport infrastructure is still very important to the total force of the united states. >> the policy discussions about building infrastructure today are tied into a lot of other objectives that arguably

interfere with infrastructure as cheaply as it might be built. you have prevailing wage laws, project labor agreements, you've giveequirements that you contracts to small business, requirements to use locally made products and u.s. made steel and that sort of ring. -- that sort of thing. how far back does it stretch in the history of the federal government's involvement in infrastructure? >> i think they go back a long way, possibly before the founding. you have the old force labor and any book about -- in a book about british roads, she talks about how they were rounded up

if they wanted bread. infrastructure is a way to soak up idleness goes way back, then it goes way forward. he is saying that into the 20th century, a lot of roads were still being done by farmers, it's equivalent to jury duty. you are pulled off and say get your horses and its road -- it is road day. this goes well back. it's probably a good thing. whether they are dams or airports, if that's your objective, everything should be built with a spoon. act,, there is a balancing but yes, historically, public works have a long tradition of providing work relief. heard in your question

in requirements that limit your alternatives perhaps in a non-optimal way and in that respect that goes way back as well. s ofstate department transportation tied their hands about what they can do within city limits. sometimes to some extent impose urban standards on dense city cores in ways where they are not so well-suited. going back, one of these -- when these constraints start kicking in you can see them go , back a long way as a reflection of successful agenda advancement, a lot of our state highways mid 20th century were typically made every enforced

-- made of reinforced portland cement. it had more to do with a success of the portland cement association for self advancement than with any obvious advantage. it has a lot of disadvantages, some of which are haunting us now. a lot of cement reinforced infrastructure is crumbling around us. does transportation experience with dedicated taxes and trust funds teach us about other infrastructure and development? >> that it's never as easy as they say it's going to be. speaking from the aviation trust fund, even after it was set up they will have continued fights about who pays the taxes,

how much is it, what can be paid out of it and what cannot, and oftentimes new things come up, . for example, the trust fund was set up in 1970. it didn't make any provision for dealing with aircraft noise. there had to be this long fight to allow for trust fund moneys to go to localities to deal with the noise issue and so on. if you think that is going to stop the political fights over it and make it a simple cash register that money can flow out of, not so much. >> the gasoline tax model of road funding has a strange and i think underappreciated history. it begins in the 1920's. it was not popular with automobile interest groups because it was viewed as a tax.

by 1930, every single state and d.c. had a gas tax. they realized this was their ticket. we lobby for the gas taxes on the condition that money go to roads, often just construction of the roads. the public selling of this model was people will pay for what they get, which is open to question because after all, five minutes on a rural, to lane at north dakota -- two lane north dakota highway will cost you as much as moving on the beltway when the cost is very different. not unlike best buy charging by

the pound for everything they sell. you would get congestion in the electronics department, not in the towels department. what i find most interesting is the internal conversation about gas taxes within the automobile interest groups. they do not save much within themselves, this makes sense because people will pay for what they get. they say instead, check it out, if we have a gas tax and the more people drive the more roads we built. that is not the end of the story because the more people will drive the more we build. this is a self reinforcing feedback loop that will give all of us a very nice retirement. >> an interesting moment in this is the first generation of limited access highways starting with the pennsylvania turnpike prior to the federal highway aid act of 1956 where a lot of highways are built with tolls, those have a different feedback

loop where people have to decide, is this trip worth the $10, the $20? in virginia we had it effort to retroactively do that and people were screaming that they had to pay $15 or $30 when in fact that cost has only been there. -- has always been there. it's only visible that you are causing $30 of congestion to people behind you, but you never noticed it before. there is something to be said for some user fees if people can find a way to not make it feel aggressive. and this debate goes all the way century.he 19th when new york opens up it is free at the pump if you want to go and get clean water at the public pump. if you want it piped into your

home, you pay extra. that is another hybrid model that reflected a little bit more as opposed to just getting it free for everyone. it is exactly noon, so we did very well in terms of our schedule. thank you all for all those great questions and thank you , peter and janet, for your considered responses. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] c-span,weekend on tonight at 9:30 p.m. eastern, the political summit in colorado springs with the debate on president trump's foreign and domestic policies.

holderat 9:00 p.m., eric at the new england council's politics and eggs event. saturday night at 9:00 eastern, the republican strategist on president trump's swing state voters and how they could impact future elections. shortly after 11:00 p.m. sunday, the untold tigers, story of the american pilots who waged a secret war against japan." on c-span3, saturday at 6:00 p.m. eastern on the civil war, the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 14th a moment -- 14th amendment. sunday at 6:30 p.m. eastern on oral histories,'s experiences, injuries and a long recovery

during the vietnam war. watch the c-span networks this weekend. weekend, american history tv is joining our spectrum cable partners to showcase the history of fort worth, texas. to learn more about the cities on our current tour, visit www.c-span.org/citiestour. we continue with our look at the history of fort worth. worth has the nomenclature "where the west begins." it's really important and there are a lot of people who realize that keeping the authenticity of has to be a really big priority. that's why having weekly rodeo is important. not why having